From left: Mr Chris Barnard, Prof Peter Zilla and Dr Bhavna Patel at the opening of the new Christian Barnard Hybrid Operating Suites at Groote Schuur Hospital (GSH)

The pride on Cardiothoracic Surgeon Professor Peter Zilla’s face said it all – the culmination of his vision, and having worked with a committed team from Groote Schuur Hospital (GSH) to complete his project, had borne fruit.  The new Christian Barnard Hybrid Operating Suites was about to be unveiled by no other than the famous Prof Chris Barnard’s son, the pioneer of heart surgery.

“The new hybrid facility builds on the legacy of Chris Barnard,” he said in his introduction, “as it enables both open heart as well as new technologies allowing minimally invasive surgery. This is the first of its kind in a public hospital in South Africa.” 

“Our patients remain our priority,” said Dr Bhavna Patel,  GSH CEO in her opening address. “The new hybrid cardiac surgery procedures will ensure more comfort, better outcomes and quicker recovery for patients undergoing heart surgery.” 

Prof Zilla, who is head of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at GSH and UCT, explained that conventional open heart surgery largely relies on a “sternotomy” in which the breastbone is surgically divided for the procedure to expose the heart before connecting the patient to a heart-lung machine which takes over both the pumping function of the heart and the breathing function of the lung.  To reduce the risk of post-operative complications and avoid the use of replacement valves wherever possible, key-hole surgery aimed at the repair of the patient’s own diseased heart valves has also become a standard procedure at Groote Schuur Hospital in recent years. 

However, as the operative risk may still be too high for some patients, the replacement of diseased heart valves is increasingly also performed as a so called “trans-catheter” procedure. Similar to a stent placed in an artery, this approach delivers a fully collapsible replacement valve into the diseased valve through a catheter.   In high-income countries like Germany more than half of all heart valve replacements are already done via such a ‘trans-catheter-procedures’ rather than through open heart surgery.

Four years after Groote Schuur Hospital adopted this cutting edge technique the program will now move into the new hybrid operating theatres which combines an operating room for open heart surgery with a catheter suite used by cardiologists for procedures such as angiograms and coronary stent implantations.

In addition to benefiting patients, the Hybrid operating suites would be a training facility for other surgeons. Groote Schuur Hospital and the University of Cape Town (UCT) are a leading academic complex  in the country, where UCT’s students receiving valuable training and experience in a public hospital setting.

In a media statement, the provincial Department of Health said that in providing a state-of-the-art facility for its trans-catheter heart valve and vascular graft program, Groote Schuur Hospital further secured its leading role as the only teaching hospital in the country that offers key-hole repair surgery and trans-catheter replacement surgery for diseased heart valves as well as diseased arteries.

The “Christian Barnard Hybrid Operating Suites”, commemorating Groote Schuur’s pioneer of heart surgery in South Africa, will also greatly expand the spectrum of other surgical disciplines whose operative techniques have equally become increasingly ‘minimally invasive’ in recent years.

The theatre was officially opened by Prof Chris Barnard son, Mr Chris Barnard, who attended with his family.